Bug Tracking Testing Tool Showdown: Bugzilla Vs. JIRA

Bugzilla is a free bug tracking option, and has garnered a 4-out-of-5 rating amongst the uTest Community in our Tool Reviews section of the site. Our testers have cited its ease of use in centralizing bugs, the fact that it’s 100% free, and its “good, stable support” as benchmarks of the high rating.

JIRA, on the other side of the ring, is a paid option, running at $10 per month for its basic issue tracking capabilities. While an incident management tool, it is commonly used for bug tracking as well in developer and tester teams. Our testers especially love its ecosystem of plugins and intuitiveness, despite the steep initial administration curve.

But if we were really concerned about each tools’ individual performance, this wouldn’t be a showdown, would it? If you were to pit these two against each other, which one would emerge victorious? Which Bug Tracking Tool rises above the other?

2 Comments

Actually – reading the post header and then its contents (as well as the Tool Reviews section) – I am a bit disappointed.
We can write many subjective reviews – but these gives us hardly any new information- nor would help us in making the decision of: Which tool to select ?
Which is quite a common question in different testing forums.

What we do need is a CrowdSourced Objective review ability:
1. List of basic set of tools parameters can be obtained from tool vendors specs.
2. Crowd can help in adding additional interesting attributes per each type of tool.
(Might need some moderation)
3. Crowd can quantify Importance of each attribute for them – as the decision is not only what to ask for but also what is more crucial for us.
4. With these abilities we can give the community a free on-line service which they can use to run their own comparison, based on existing data and adapted to their selections, and the results they will log can be used to further improve the extensiveness of the data for following users.
(Of course they will be able to run it in privacy or as logged in users who can later return to view/print/save and adapt their data)
5. We can break attributes to several sub-chapters, giving each a separate score – Agile might have other needs then others, or Mobile may have other needs than in Medical arena.
6. Some filtering can be used in the decision of which tools to compare to which – free vs. commercial etc.

While BugZilla is a great tool for basic defect tracking, I think JIRA truly shines in its ability to be easily integrated with. It has been able to grow its own ecosystem of partners, tools, and plugins that have allowed it to evolve from an issue tracking system to a full fledged ALM. The beauty of Atlassian and JIRA is that they do not handcuff you into buying a particular set of products that you may only use half of.